Sunday Summary

This has been a crazy week. I feel like I cannot get anything done in the lab without slacking in every other area. Like my advisor said, “Grad school is a lesson in efficiency.”

My project is taking off…thank God! But I keep running into little snafu-s. Molecular cloning is not my friend right now. A couple weeks ago, I championed myself as the master of cloning troubleshooting. Now, I’m face to face with a mystery. Hopefully some additional controls will let me know where my experiment is going wrong.

I’m gearing up for my first committee meeting. This is my first step towards my preliminary exam. It’s something like the end of the world in my mind. I know it’s coming, but I just don’t want to think about it. Each day, I just try to chip away at this big block of chaos.

Thursday, I had the honor of hearing Dr. Lewis Johnson from FAMU speak to a group of minority graduate students in the sciences. He presented a series of quotes from a variety of sources – like Benjamin Mays to Guinan from Star Trek The Next Generation – and spoke about how the applied to the graduate school process and entering academia. It was pretty interesting.

My Evolutionary Genetics test went well … I believe. My Dad laughs whenever I tell him that I think I did well on something so I’m going to celebrate. He says it’s like grading my own paper – of course I’ll be lenient and explain the errors away.

I woke up this morning and treated myself to some strawberry pancakes. I deserved something nice. A cup of blueberry coffee and some Bisquick pancakes with fresh strawberries. I didn’t even bother to make them from scratch. Don’t judge me!

Well I’m headed to school to meet with this girl and discuss Drosophila seminal fluid proteins… yuck! Then I have to prepare for the rest of this week in the lab.